It will be a work destined to change the city’s transport system. This, in general, is the assumption and hope that the city authorities had on the day of the inauguration of the construction site for the Catanzaro surface metro. A work begun in 2017 with completion of the works scheduled for 2020, then postponed to April 30, 2025, deadline set by the Infrastructure and Public Works Department of the Calabria Region which created a new working group to support the Rup. Yet another postponement led the National Anti-Corruption Authority to intervene, pointing the finger at the significant delays and the “non-compliance of the procedures with the principles of timeliness and cost-effectiveness of the works. Ineffective overall management by the contracting authority, which did not operate energetically to avoid or in any case limit the heavy delays that accumulated in the execution of the works”.
The long-awaited subway, therefore, has suffered slowdowns over time due to the discovery of archaeological finds (a Magna Graecia villa), the discovery of war devices, then the pandemic with the halting of works and the rise in prices of construction materials. In this sense, ANAC found “a technical/administrative process not based on the criteria of economy and timeliness established by law, with a progressive increase in the cost of the intervention and execution time”.
“The contractual amount has been increased several times – explains the Authority – going from 81,623,701 euros in 2015 to 116,103,766 euros in 2022, following the third variant appraisal, with an overall increase therefore of 42.22% approximately, to which are added a further 6,733,656.21 euros paid to the company following the settlement deed of 16.12.2019″. The Catanzaro metro is un strategic intervention for the regional capital. This is an intervention that once completed will connect the Germaneto area, now the business center of the city of the three hills, with the upper part of the city. A work of mending between two key points of the urban system of Catanzaro which will be useful to give orographic continuity to two otherwise “foreign” places, a means of transport that the people of Catanzaro have been waiting for for too long now.
With the hope that it will soon be able to come into operation and its management costs can be considered sustainable given that some doubts in this regard have been expressed in the past.
